Isn’t that a really cool title? It’s the name I gave to my most experimental piece of flash fiction, which is now published by LampLight, a quarterly magazine of literary dark fiction. The issue is available for USD 2.99 in a variety of formats, if you’re interested in reading some really cool stories! Submission guidelines are here.

Oddly, I never set out to write dark fiction, but that is where my stories do sometimes end up. I don’t believe in genre boundaries anyway – one person’s horror is another person’s science fiction, and one person’s fantasy is often another’s literary piece.

My story follows a prospector on the moon who runs out of oxygen and takes an unexpected journey. At one point I had him watch the ‘Earth rise’ over Tycho, and hastily edited out the word ‘rise’. Because if you’re on the moon, you do not really see the Earth rising and setting, like you see the moon rising and setting when you’re on Earth. On the moon, you can either see the Earth or you can’t. You don’t really see it move much across the sky. This is because the moon always presents the same face to the Earth.

However, because the moon’s orbit is tilted at an angle of 5 degrees w.r.t. the Earth’s equator, there will be some locations on the moon where the Earth slowly rises/sets during the lunar month. I established that one can see the Earth from Tycho, however I don’t think one can actually see Earth rise/set from there. I could be wrong, of course. Science-y folks are welcome to correct me!